It seems like either LILO or GRUB, the boot loaders, were
never installed correctly. If you made a rescue disk during the
installation (of course you did, right?), use it to boot your
computer. When you get the root Linux shell prompt (#), type
lilo -v, which should attempt to write the boot
loader into your hard disk.

Is it possible to have an internet mail server with a dial-up
connection to an ISP? I know that the IP address of ppp0 may change
whenever I establish a new connection with the ISP. The MX records
need to point to the mail server; the IP address of the server also
must be specified at dewdesigns but will not be valid if or when I
get a new connection. Do I need to run DNS locally or can I use the
ISP DNS? I recently read an article by Marcel Gagné
regarding small-office mail servers, but I feel that I am missing
some pieces of the puzzle.

There are ways to have an SMTP server on a dial-up dynamic IP
and set up DNS so that it gets updated every time you change your
IP address, but trust me, you do not want to go there. Short of
running UUCP, which is the correct way to route mail in your case
(UUCP is quite old, not well-known by most system administrators
and probably not supported by your ISP), you should use Fetchmail
to download your mail. If you need to download mail for many
accounts, you can have your ISP spool all your mail in one mailbox,
download that with Fetchmail, and split it up again, looking at the
Envelope-To: field or whatever field in which your ISP stored the
original Envelope-To.

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